Genre

Producer

Distributor

Release Date

Release Notes

Official Website

Review

Does any other American
president have such an extensive fictional pop-culture mythos? In the
thirties, the hero of John Ford and Henry Fonda’s Young Mr. Lincoln
fought misguided lynch mobs and fancy city lawyers with false modesty
and folksy credulousness. Today, Timur Bekmambetov and Seth
Grahame-Smith’s Honest Abe fights vampires with the shock and awe of
Hollywood’s full CG firepower. So, maybe each generation gets the
Lincoln it deserves. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our films, but in
ourselves — to paraphrase the Earl of Oxford.

If I sound like I’m taking a movie called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
a bit too seriously, that’s because the movie, directed by Bekmambetov
and based on Grahame-Smith’s novel, kind of takes itself seriously.
Producer Tim Burton’s name might be prominent in the credits, but his
cheekiness is nowhere to be found. Bekmambetov likes his action
theatrics to be consequential. In the Night Watch and Day Watch movies, nothing less than the future of the human race was at stake. The assassins in Wanted weren’t just assassins; they were an ancient race of supernatural assassins. And Vampire Hunter
isn’t just a riff on the adventures a young Abe Lincoln (Benjamin
Walker) might have had — it essentially turns the Civil War into a
personal vendetta.

The vampires, led by dandyish, cold-eyed Adam (Rufus Sewell), are
slave traders, one of which (Marton Csokas) kills young Abe’s mother
after he tries to prevent them from selling his black friend Will. Using
his famous ax-wielding skills and with some Morpheus-like help from
good vampire Henry Sturgess (Dominic Cooper), the future president
becomes a hunter of the undead. But the story actually goes up through
the battle of Gettysburg, where the Army of the Potomac (a.k.a. the
Union) is on the verge of being laid low by an undead corps of the
Confederacy, before Lincoln rushes to the rescue.

Believe it or not, Bekmambetov’s style is somewhat restrained
here. There’s still a lot of slow-motion acrobatic lunacy and bursts of
gore, but he keeps some of his worst instincts — a fondness for
kineticism rather than clarity, for example, that hobbled Day Watch
–— in check, and we can actually follow the action occurring onscreen.
He’s also always had an eye for strange moments of cinematic grandeur:
small glints glimpsed in an overhead shot of a town being requisitioned
for its silver; a train hurtling in the night toward a massive wooden
trestle bridge in flames.

Unfortunately, there’s also a certain artificiality to the whole
film, both visually and narratively. By sticking a little too much to
some of the actual particulars of the Lincoln story (even Stephen
Douglas shows up, as he did in Young Mr. Lincoln, acourting the future Mary Todd Lincoln), the film has the strangely programmed feel of a historical pageant, as if Raiders of the Lost Ark had been crossbred with The Longest Day.
Matters aren’t helped by Benjamin Walker’s indistinct performance: With
his expressionless face and his smooth, half-formed features, he
resembles nothing so much as a Liam Neeson action figure. Still, there
is something bracing about a film that’s not afraid to link the entire
Confederacy, still an inexplicable source of pride in some parts of the
country, with a race of humanity-enslaving vampires. I can’t wait to see how this thing plays in South Carolina.
— Bilge Ebiri